So now I need to travel to Argentina to handle a bug problem? Because I'm reasonably sure that there are no businesses around here actively importing kidney bean leaves. I've definitely never seen them in WalMart or any of the grocery stores I shop at.
What local chain do you typically purchase your truckloads of kidney bean leaves from?
Haven't you heard? There's this thing called The Market. It's the Cure for Everything.
Seriously. They don't ship produce up from South America and into local stores for idle amusement. They ship it because people buy it. Like Yerba Maté, Chilean wines, Brazilian citrus, and other things that either don't grow in the US or have high enough out-of-season demands.
The reason he got elected was the color of his skin. Nothing more and nothing less.
Actually, I had been hoping that if a member of the opposing party took over, he'd roll back some of the excesses of the previous administration, blow the covers off of others, and just generally get the country out of its post-9/11 jelly-belly mindset and shine some light on the cockroaches.
So you might say I was HOPING for a CHANGE.
Didn't get one, though. The lights are still out, the roaches run rampant and the "opposing side" turns out to simply be the same side with a different cartoon figure. Race had nothing to do with it.
Yes you are. You're either fighting it, voicing your disapproval about it, approving it to others, or approving it by your silence. Even claiming you don't care has something to do with it.
So one way or another, on one side or another, you have something to do with it.
You must be the kind of person who steals candy from babies too.
Honestly, there is no legitimate reason to run Adblock if you live in an English speaking part of the world. You block, you're a thief. This is not like video interstitials on TV/youtube that waste your time by not being skip able.
The bandwidth argument can only be applied to 2.5G EDGE networks.
The real problem with OPENX is that it's the example that proves the rule that open source doesn't automatically make something better.
I appreciate a good ad. However, I'm no more interested in being assaulted by annoying ads than I am in being accosted by muggers. I don't routinely block, but if they affront me with auto-playing noisy dreck, you can bet I'm going to block them.
It's really more of a guideline and an old adage which is generally true but it is far from a "law".
Moore's "Law" is actually more of a graph in the general shape of a parabola (doubling of capability every few years). The "slowing" is an indication that the graph is not a pure parabola extending to infinity (which no sensible person could have ever believed) and we are entering a point where the acceleration of capabilty on schedule slows or stops.
"Slowing" of Moore's law is either a shorthand way of saying "slowing of the acceleration rate asserted by Moore's Law" or just plain sloppy expression. Pedants are freely invited to argue over which.
"The thing that I find amazing is that Bezos is the one to launch a successful e-reader..."
That's not quite how it happened, if I remember correctly. When the first e-reader became available, there was a huge amount of press about the new technology.
Amazon negotiated with publishers. with whom the company already had contracts, for e-books. There are a lot of people who can't or won't carry heavy books. It was easy to see there was a market.
Yup. I had been reading books on portable devices since the days of the Newton. What Amazon did that made the market explode was implement a reader on an e-ink device with a form factor that was slim and lighweight, yet presented a page that approximated the size of a paperback book. And didn't have to be fed batteries every few hours.
As for people going off and leaving your job later, that can happen at any time anyway.
It might happen a lot less often, however, if you make your company a place where people want to stay.
You don't even have to be the best-paying place in town. There are plenty of studies that indicate that a lot of people value other things than just money when it comes to their job. Even though good pay never hurts.
And as far as real over-qualifications go, it's always possible that a need may turn up for someone with those qualifications. While it's fashionable these days to treat people as interchangeable cogs and go outside for talent, there are advantages to being able to tap a known quantity, and especially one who already knows the corporate structure and culture. For me, at least, getting up to speed on a new technology happens quickly. But knowing where to go outside my department when things need doing takes longer.
no.. this is about blind people complaining that audio captchas are too hard. you know why they complain? they haven't had to deal with a bunch of impossible visual captchas.
slashdot is one of the few sites with reasonable captchas.
There's more than just that involved.
A certain nameless site for a very popular product has color captchas. I desperately needed support, but could not register because it used a color captcha which rendered very poorly at my screen resolution and used colors that strained my less-than-perfect color vision.
And the maddening thing about it was was that I already had seen plenty of spam posted to the forums. The spammers had presumably simply hired cheap labor to defeat the captchas manually.
That's definitely true, and the sad part is writing relatively reliable and software doesn't really take any longer than writing crap software, if you know how to do it.
Perhaps not, if you include all the time spent going back and fixing stuff that broke in front of the while world (production).
Unfortunately, management typically thinks that "time to write" is only the time spent getting a pretty picture up on the screen.
Is it selfishness as a species or as a group of individuals that leads to an ecosystem collapse? As a species, doesn't selfishness mean survival at any cost? Even the extreme cost of preserving the ecosystem? Perhaps the error is that we are selfish on the wrong level - as individuals rather than as a species. I am admittedly drunk, but it sounds like a rather profound question, so, what the heck, I'm asking.
Well, it's not quite as simple as it seems. We're dealing with issues that may have more than one "right" answer, and many of the "right" answers may actually be wrong, but we won't be able to tell until too late to back up and try something better.
Then there's just plain old stubborn human perversity. There are some people who'd as soon extinct the entire human race - themselves included - rather than admit that they were wrong. If enough of them get their selfish way, we're all screwed.
No wonder people don't respect our field -- we don't respect it ourselves.... We've taken the secrets and tools of our trade, open sourced them
I definitely don't respect programmers who think they need to keep their source hidden in order to stay competitive.
I think more accurately, we don't respect our work.
There's too much of the "Git 'er Dun!" philosophy these days. System crash? Who cares? Have You Tried Powering it Off and Back On Again?
We're too obsessed with being "efficient" and being "productive" and not enough with the quality of what we produce. So we produce crap, people see that it's crap, don't respect our skills, and say "Any 10-year old kid can do software!" Because so much of what we as "professionals" produce looks like it came from 10-year old kids.
I have never met a competent developer who had trouble finding work.
I HAVE met incompetent out-of-touch, burnt-out, full-of-themselves developers who can't find work. It's this second kind that think they're good but are not and who should be in another field.
So you're like 18, or something?
From mid-2001 to the same time in 2003 I spent more time not working than working. Headhunters all ran and hid. Before that, I had been part of the OS support team on one of the larger mainframes in town, solely responsible for several mission-critical products, then a developer for software for various different platforms. I was an early adopter of both C++ and Java, worked with J2EE before JSPs had been invented. I actually developed and brought one of the very first C++ compiler systems to the PC market.
These days, I have clients who are quite happy with my ability to resolve thorny technical issues and keep their business prosperous and growing.
But there have been fat times and there have been lean times. Be grateful if you haven't experienced the lean ones. Or if you have the people skills to keep Management loving you when they start kicking people with demonstrated abilities out on the street.
Can we please put developers in the back seat as run of the mill production workers like they belong. I respect a minority of software architects, but plain jane code toads need to be getting the treatment and pay of the few steps above fry cook that they are.
The way most companies work aritechture is an underfunded joke and each and every decent programmer is their own architect. The REALLY good ones play well with others AND do their own brilliant designs.
If the developers you are employing are a step above fry cooks, please tell me which company you work for so I can avoid having anything to do with that disaster waiting to happen.
The joke in my town is that "architect" is the title of the person who ships the work to the offshore coders.
In.NET, you exactly have the same thing: ObsoleteAttribute. It's not often used, but it does exist.
The cynic in me notes that one of the reasons.Net even exists is that Microsoft's attempted hijacking of Java was quashed. So, one could suspect that they may have lifted the concept from Java.
But if it made the Microsoft world a better place, that's fine by me.
But it's perfectly possible to sandbox native code.
Actually, I think the BSD crowd prefers the term "jail".
The main difference between Java and native code is that in Java, there's always a sandbox. Native code either has to be self-jailing or some sort of jail has to be externally imposed on it.
I'm not saying this to assert that Java is the One True Language, superior in every way to all others. I'm just being a pedantic little snot.
Java does NOT perform anywhere close to as efficiently as C/C++. You might be able to get message transmissions to take the same time, but the Java environment will undoubtedly take more system resources. The same happens with any through the kitchen sink of libraries at it interpreted language..Net, Java, Ruby. In my experience Perl runs faster than those 3 but managers have been led to believe that Perl has a slower time to market, thus is slipping from the mainstream. The closer you get to stripped down, just what you need, compiled language, the faster and less system resources the code will take to execute.
The big issue with language decisions these days is that they tend to be driven by perceived market value. People are the most expensive cost to most businesses these days. So the marketing battle between languages focuses less on performance and more on how experienced and expensive your developers need to be. What I see being missed with this marketing is that by lowering the people quality and marginalizing your language and code quality, you are setting yourself up for maintenance, improvement, and performance costs down the road.
Never trust the assertions of people who say "undoubtedly", "obviously", "just plain common sense", etc.
A lot of "undoubtable" things are wrong. Especially when they're based on how things "should" be. Doubt. Measure.
Java is far, far safer than C++. C++ does not enforce type safety at all. For example, in Java you cannot possibly have a buffer overrun or access freed memory as you can in C++. I think most of the security notices are about C and C++ programs, not Java programs. I think you're referring to the Java runtime, which is written in, you guessed it, C.
Yet it is Java that has had its run-time environments pulled for security concerns.
In perspective, the RTEs have been pulled because they had flaws that enabled exploit code to be run. In C, the RTE lets ANY code be run, including exploits, so what's really happening is that Java is falling back to something closer to C levels of runtime security.
The reason for the concern about Java exploitability is that while most sane people have long since given up on download-and-run C code (ActiveX), Java applets (while comparatively rare) have not had exploit concerns until fairly recently. Because until recently, Java's sandbox was considered trustworthy. C/C++ doesn't have a sandbox.
... is that you get to rewrite your applications in 2 years? Or less?
You're thinking of Microsoft.
Java is the only programming language I have run across in common usage that incorporates a deprecation mechanism.
When code becomes obsolete, you can tag it as deprecated. It will produce warnings when compiled, IDEs and javadocs will highlight it as deprecated, but it continues to be usable. That means that you can delete the code at your leisure instead of being forced to confront - and fix/bypass broken code when you're doing a completely unrelated emergency repair the way that I had to do far too many times using Microsoft C.
Sun has been extremely conservative about pulling deprecated functions. The Date(month, day, year) constructor has been deprecated for more than a decade, having been pulled because of its inflexibility in regard to timezones and other locale sensitivities. But applications that were coded to use it continue to compile and run to this very day.
Microsoft, on the other hand, yanked an entire SOAP library out from under me while I was still Beta-testing once.
I'm not saying that they reproduce themselves by analysing their own structure, of course they use plans. Yes, each part that Machine 1 produces should be more or less identical. But if you assemble those things into Machine 2, then the parts that it produces will be inferior to Machine 1's output. Make Machine 3 with them, and the parts that it produces will be even worse. You can't stop transcription errors, and they will compound upon themselves. This is basic information theory. You need some process to correct the errors, which is usually human intervention in the mechanical world, and is random gene recombination and natural selection in the natural world. It is possible to make a machine that produces parts that are to a higher tolerance than the machine itself, but it has to be a special purpose design that does one thing relally well, and is not suited to 3D printers.
I think that the best argument against that is to consider pre-printer tools. We have lots of specialized precision instruments these days. However, God did not create the original instruments 6000 years ago and leave them lying around the landscape. They were created from less-precise precursors. Which, in turn, were created from even cruder precursors. Until you end up going all the way back to funny-shaped rocks.
The precision of what comes out is constrained by the precision of what produces it, true. But the information used to produce the output is even more important, as it is what allows us to transcend instead of decay.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but donkey led the quest itself.
It's frequently an ass who takes the leadership position.
So now I need to travel to Argentina to handle a bug problem? Because I'm reasonably sure that there are no businesses around here actively importing kidney bean leaves. I've definitely never seen them in WalMart or any of the grocery stores I shop at.
What local chain do you typically purchase your truckloads of kidney bean leaves from?
Haven't you heard? There's this thing called The Market. It's the Cure for Everything.
Seriously. They don't ship produce up from South America and into local stores for idle amusement. They ship it because people buy it. Like Yerba Maté, Chilean wines, Brazilian citrus, and other things that either don't grow in the US or have high enough out-of-season demands.
Well he turned 30. So I guess Obama will be scrambling the jets anyway.
He already did. He just used French jets was all. Remember Uruguay?
The reason he got elected was the color of his skin. Nothing more and nothing less.
Actually, I had been hoping that if a member of the opposing party took over, he'd roll back some of the excesses of the previous administration, blow the covers off of others, and just generally get the country out of its post-9/11 jelly-belly mindset and shine some light on the cockroaches.
So you might say I was HOPING for a CHANGE.
Didn't get one, though. The lights are still out, the roaches run rampant and the "opposing side" turns out to simply be the same side with a different cartoon figure. Race had nothing to do with it.
I'm an American and I have nothing to do with it.
Yes you are. You're either fighting it, voicing your disapproval about it, approving it to others, or approving it by your silence. Even claiming you don't care has something to do with it.
So one way or another, on one side or another, you have something to do with it.
Please tell me where I can purchase fresh kidney bean leaves in Iowa, in January, and in large quantities.
Just because a solution exists does not mean it's practical, or even possible to implement.
The same place you get your zucchini from, most likely. Argentina or someplace like that. It's Summer down there.
You must be the kind of person who steals candy from babies too.
Honestly, there is no legitimate reason to run Adblock if you live in an English speaking part of the world. You block, you're a thief. This is not like video interstitials on TV/youtube that waste your time by not being skip able.
The bandwidth argument can only be applied to 2.5G EDGE networks.
The real problem with OPENX is that it's the example that proves the rule that open source doesn't automatically make something better.
I appreciate a good ad. However, I'm no more interested in being assaulted by annoying ads than I am in being accosted by muggers. I don't routinely block, but if they affront me with auto-playing noisy dreck, you can bet I'm going to block them.
And tell your brat to stop crying.
I snicker at the term "Moor's law" myself....
It's really more of a guideline and an old adage which is generally true but it is far from a "law".
Moore's "Law" is actually more of a graph in the general shape of a parabola (doubling of capability every few years). The "slowing" is an indication that the graph is not a pure parabola extending to infinity (which no sensible person could have ever believed) and we are entering a point where the acceleration of capabilty on schedule slows or stops.
"Slowing" of Moore's law is either a shorthand way of saying "slowing of the acceleration rate asserted by Moore's Law" or just plain sloppy expression. Pedants are freely invited to argue over which.
"The thing that I find amazing is that Bezos is the one to launch a successful e-reader..."
That's not quite how it happened, if I remember correctly. When the first e-reader became available, there was a huge amount of press about the new technology.
Amazon negotiated with publishers. with whom the company already had contracts, for e-books. There are a lot of people who can't or won't carry heavy books. It was easy to see there was a market.
Yup. I had been reading books on portable devices since the days of the Newton. What Amazon did that made the market explode was implement a reader on an e-ink device with a form factor that was slim and lighweight, yet presented a page that approximated the size of a paperback book. And didn't have to be fed batteries every few hours.
As for people going off and leaving your job later, that can happen at any time anyway.
It might happen a lot less often, however, if you make your company a place where people want to stay.
You don't even have to be the best-paying place in town. There are plenty of studies that indicate that a lot of people value other things than just money when it comes to their job. Even though good pay never hurts.
And as far as real over-qualifications go, it's always possible that a need may turn up for someone with those qualifications. While it's fashionable these days to treat people as interchangeable cogs and go outside for talent, there are advantages to being able to tap a known quantity, and especially one who already knows the corporate structure and culture. For me, at least, getting up to speed on a new technology happens quickly. But knowing where to go outside my department when things need doing takes longer.
no.. this is about blind people complaining that audio captchas are too hard.
you know why they complain? they haven't had to deal with a bunch of impossible visual captchas.
slashdot is one of the few sites with reasonable captchas.
There's more than just that involved.
A certain nameless site for a very popular product has color captchas. I desperately needed support, but could not register because it used a color captcha which rendered very poorly at my screen resolution and used colors that strained my less-than-perfect color vision.
And the maddening thing about it was was that I already had seen plenty of spam posted to the forums. The spammers had presumably simply hired cheap labor to defeat the captchas manually.
Imagine Donkey (from Shrek) played by Morgan Freeman or Darth Vader played by Danny de Vito.
Imagine Eddie Murphy playing a Chinese Dragon in Mulan. Oh wait...
That's definitely true, and the sad part is writing relatively reliable and software doesn't really take any longer than writing crap software, if you know how to do it.
Perhaps not, if you include all the time spent going back and fixing stuff that broke in front of the while world (production).
Unfortunately, management typically thinks that "time to write" is only the time spent getting a pretty picture up on the screen.
Interesting...
Is it selfishness as a species or as a group of individuals that leads to an ecosystem collapse? As a species, doesn't selfishness mean survival at any cost? Even the extreme cost of preserving the ecosystem? Perhaps the error is that we are selfish on the wrong level - as individuals rather than as a species. I am admittedly drunk, but it sounds like a rather profound question, so, what the heck, I'm asking.
Well, it's not quite as simple as it seems. We're dealing with issues that may have more than one "right" answer, and many of the "right" answers may actually be wrong, but we won't be able to tell until too late to back up and try something better.
Then there's just plain old stubborn human perversity. There are some people who'd as soon extinct the entire human race - themselves included - rather than admit that they were wrong. If enough of them get their selfish way, we're all screwed.
No wonder people don't respect our field -- we don't respect it ourselves. ...
We've taken the secrets and tools of our trade, open sourced them
I definitely don't respect programmers who think they need to keep their source hidden in order to stay competitive.
I think more accurately, we don't respect our work.
There's too much of the "Git 'er Dun!" philosophy these days. System crash? Who cares? Have You Tried Powering it Off and Back On Again?
We're too obsessed with being "efficient" and being "productive" and not enough with the quality of what we produce. So we produce crap, people see that it's crap, don't respect our skills, and say "Any 10-year old kid can do software!" Because so much of what we as "professionals" produce looks like it came from 10-year old kids.
I have never met a competent developer who had trouble finding work.
I HAVE met incompetent out-of-touch, burnt-out, full-of-themselves developers who can't find work. It's this second kind that think they're good but are not and who should be in another field.
So you're like 18, or something?
From mid-2001 to the same time in 2003 I spent more time not working than working. Headhunters all ran and hid. Before that, I had been part of the OS support team on one of the larger mainframes in town, solely responsible for several mission-critical products, then a developer for software for various different platforms. I was an early adopter of both C++ and Java, worked with J2EE before JSPs had been invented. I actually developed and brought one of the very first C++ compiler systems to the PC market.
These days, I have clients who are quite happy with my ability to resolve thorny technical issues and keep their business prosperous and growing.
But there have been fat times and there have been lean times. Be grateful if you haven't experienced the lean ones. Or if you have the people skills to keep Management loving you when they start kicking people with demonstrated abilities out on the street.
Can we please put developers in the back seat as run of the mill production workers like they belong. I respect a minority of software architects, but plain jane code toads need to be getting the treatment and pay of the few steps above fry cook that they are.
The way most companies work aritechture is an underfunded joke and each and every decent programmer is their own architect. The REALLY good ones play well with others AND do their own brilliant designs.
If the developers you are employing are a step above fry cooks, please tell me which company you work for so I can avoid having anything to do with that disaster waiting to happen.
The joke in my town is that "architect" is the title of the person who ships the work to the offshore coders.
In .NET, you exactly have the same thing: ObsoleteAttribute. It's not often used, but it does exist.
The cynic in me notes that one of the reasons .Net even exists is that Microsoft's attempted hijacking of Java was quashed. So, one could suspect that they may have lifted the concept from Java.
But if it made the Microsoft world a better place, that's fine by me.
Vile, just vile.
Reproducing? The filthy things were proliferating as maggots upon a piece of rotten meat.
Humans! Ugh.
Loathe them or despise them, you just can't like them.
But it's perfectly possible to sandbox native code.
Actually, I think the BSD crowd prefers the term "jail".
The main difference between Java and native code is that in Java, there's always a sandbox. Native code either has to be self-jailing or some sort of jail has to be externally imposed on it.
I'm not saying this to assert that Java is the One True Language, superior in every way to all others. I'm just being a pedantic little snot.
Java does NOT perform anywhere close to as efficiently as C/C++. You might be able to get message transmissions to take the same time, but the Java environment will undoubtedly take more system resources. The same happens with any through the kitchen sink of libraries at it interpreted language. .Net, Java, Ruby. In my experience Perl runs faster than those 3 but managers have been led to believe that Perl has a slower time to market, thus is slipping from the mainstream. The closer you get to stripped down, just what you need, compiled language, the faster and less system resources the code will take to execute.
The big issue with language decisions these days is that they tend to be driven by perceived market value. People are the most expensive cost to most businesses these days. So the marketing battle between languages focuses less on performance and more on how experienced and expensive your developers need to be. What I see being missed with this marketing is that by lowering the people quality and marginalizing your language and code quality, you are setting yourself up for maintenance, improvement, and performance costs down the road.
Never trust the assertions of people who say "undoubtedly", "obviously", "just plain common sense", etc.
A lot of "undoubtable" things are wrong. Especially when they're based on how things "should" be. Doubt. Measure.
Java is far, far safer than C++. C++ does not enforce type safety at all. For example, in Java you cannot possibly have a buffer overrun or access freed memory as you can in C++. I think most of the security notices are about C and C++ programs, not Java programs. I think you're referring to the Java runtime, which is written in, you guessed it, C.
Yet it is Java that has had its run-time environments pulled for security concerns.
In perspective, the RTEs have been pulled because they had flaws that enabled exploit code to be run. In C, the RTE lets ANY code be run, including exploits, so what's really happening is that Java is falling back to something closer to C levels of runtime security.
The reason for the concern about Java exploitability is that while most sane people have long since given up on download-and-run C code (ActiveX), Java applets (while comparatively rare) have not had exploit concerns until fairly recently. Because until recently, Java's sandbox was considered trustworthy. C/C++ doesn't have a sandbox.
... is that you get to rewrite your applications in 2 years? Or less?
You're thinking of Microsoft.
Java is the only programming language I have run across in common usage that incorporates a deprecation mechanism.
When code becomes obsolete, you can tag it as deprecated. It will produce warnings when compiled, IDEs and javadocs will highlight it as deprecated, but it continues to be usable. That means that you can delete the code at your leisure instead of being forced to confront - and fix/bypass broken code when you're doing a completely unrelated emergency repair the way that I had to do far too many times using Microsoft C.
Sun has been extremely conservative about pulling deprecated functions. The Date(month, day, year) constructor has been deprecated for more than a decade, having been pulled because of its inflexibility in regard to timezones and other locale sensitivities. But applications that were coded to use it continue to compile and run to this very day.
Microsoft, on the other hand, yanked an entire SOAP library out from under me while I was still Beta-testing once.
I'm not saying that they reproduce themselves by analysing their own structure, of course they use plans. Yes, each part that Machine 1 produces should be more or less identical. But if you assemble those things into Machine 2, then the parts that it produces will be inferior to Machine 1's output. Make Machine 3 with them, and the parts that it produces will be even worse. You can't stop transcription errors, and they will compound upon themselves. This is basic information theory. You need some process to correct the errors, which is usually human intervention in the mechanical world, and is random gene recombination and natural selection in the natural world. It is possible to make a machine that produces parts that are to a higher tolerance than the machine itself, but it has to be a special purpose design that does one thing relally well, and is not suited to 3D printers.
I think that the best argument against that is to consider pre-printer tools. We have lots of specialized precision instruments these days. However, God did not create the original instruments 6000 years ago and leave them lying around the landscape. They were created from less-precise precursors. Which, in turn, were created from even cruder precursors. Until you end up going all the way back to funny-shaped rocks.
The precision of what comes out is constrained by the precision of what produces it, true. But the information used to produce the output is even more important, as it is what allows us to transcend instead of decay.
but data recovery is only an foia request away.
Request denied!
-- Col. WIlhelm Klink, Information Officer, NSA.